Seattle Police Officers
Nearly a year ago, the Department of Justice was called in to investigate allegations of abuse and civil rights violations at the hands of the Seattle Police Department, and today the DOJ released its report:
Their conclusions?
• Seattle police officers too quickly resort to the use of impact weapons, such as batons and flashlights. When SPD officers use batons, 57 percent of the time it is either unnecessary or excessive, the investigation found.
• Seattle officers escalate situations and use unnecessary or excessive force when arresting individuals for minor offenses. This trend is pronounced in encounters with persons with mental illnesses or those under the influence of alcohol or drugs. “This is problematic because SPD estimates that 70 percent of use-of-force encounters involve these populations,” the report said.
• Multiple officers at a time use unnecessary or excessive force together against a single subject. Of the excessive use of force incidents identified by the Justice Department, 61 percent of the cases involved more than one officer.
• In any given year, a minority of officers account for a disproportionate number of use of force incidents. Over the more than two-year period reviewed, 11 officers used force 15 or more times, and 31 officers used force 10 or more times.
• In 2010, just 20 officers accounted for 18 percent of all use-of-force incidents. Yet, SPD has no effective supervisory techniques to better analyze why these officers use force more than other officers, whether their uses of force are necessary, or whether any of these officers would benefit from additional use of force training.
Since I’ve been writing about these issues all year, I will exercise current restraint so as not to take a cheap opportunity to pile on the department.
I will, however, take this opportunity to repeat what I feel is a large part of the solution to these problems.
Residency requirements.
The Seattle Police Department is not a local police department, rather, it is a heavily-militarized occupation force. Nearly 80% of SPD officers live somewhere other than Seattle, and this “occupation mentality” is one of the primary reasons that police are so hostile toward our people. They are not one of us. They are not our friends, they are not our family, they are not our neighbors. They have no skin in the livability of our town. They do not feel that Seattle is an attractive place to live and raise a family. We are simply subjects standing between the police officers and their paychecks.
As the DOJ report clearly shows, we are treated accordingly.
In addition, I think our current police chief has overstayed his welcome. These problems have flourished under his watch, and I do not believe that he can salvage the confidence of the people at this point in the game.
For the time being, I will leave my comments there.
Here’s hoping that this report will finally bring much-needed, long-overdue changes to our struggling police department.
Update: Ugh. No sooner did the ink on the DOJ report dry before this new video surfaced.
http://www.kirotv.com/news/news/lawyer-everett-man-was-roughed-cursed-seattle-poli/nF4mR/
Remember, few of those officers live in the “big city”, and you don’t have to be very tough to walk the streets of First Hill with a gun. And a taser. And pepper spray. And a baton. And an armed backup.
In a Justice Department rife with problems of their own, I have a hard time believing you give as much credence to their politically correct investigation as you do. As a former police officer in the area, I know SPD tactics and procedures a bit (I was not on their force) and I know exactly what it is they face in certain areas, both downtown, where I believe the stats you point out are less likely to have occurred, and in the Rainier Valley, where they are more likely.
The vast majority of those use of force stats are probably focused in specific, high-crime areas, though your recounting of the JD report does not offer this kind of specificity. Thus, I still have no evidence that it matters that there are a small percentage of officers using a “disproportionate” amount of the force used in Seattle. Someone patrolling Queen Anne on 1st watch (mornings) may not use force all year long, while someone on 3rd watch in the Valley, or in Pioneer Square, may require it weekly.
BTW, define “use of force.” Any placing of hands on someone to cajole them into an activity, such as leaving an area or placing them under arrest, can be defined as such. What were the parameters on the JD report for defining this term? How many of the use of force incidents were deemed improper based on the training SPD receives? You cannot discipline an officer who is not violating department policy and training. And how many of these incidents resulted in injury, as opposed to just a complaint? A criminal in New York city expects a beating when he fights police – and doesn’t complain. A jay-walker in Seattle will complain if a cop looks at them from across the street.
I don’t mean to defend every incident that has shown up on video. There are clearly occasional incidents that must be dealt with – and I am certain that the department does so, even more than most departments nationally. However, to cast a pall over the whole department based on a few videos, as if that can be extrapolated out to taint every use of force incident, is patently unfair – sort of like saying your 8600M cannot be replaced because your computer won’t boot. How many videos of arrests are taken that never make the news because they are proper arrests and the use of force, which is necessary in this job, was also proper?
Lastly, back to the DOJ. Any department that won’t even investigate the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation in the 2008 elections or the offering of a bounty on the head of George Zimmerman, and who allows guns to run across into Mexico but stonewalls the Congressional investigation, obviously has an agenda that doesn’t necessarily match a traditional understanding of policing or justice. If you side with the DOJ on this issue, then I’m not certain you’re expecting a truly pro-active, anti-crime approach from your police department. You want the PPD. And if that’s what you want, then you’ll get the same violent crime rate and pan-handling that the hands-off policing policy in their downtown area has wrought. In short, DOJ does not want policing, it wants room for criminal elements to thrive. Last month I was in Seattle and saw the up-tick in aggressive pan-handling, getting no less than 11 requests for money in a one-half-hour period. It’s apparently safe for the mendicants to return to Seattle these days, which tells me it is also safe for other purveyors of more criminal activities.
In the last 20 years I have watched Seattle’s policing get weakened by the feigned indignation of its citizens when they see, thanks to modern cellular phone videography, what it truly takes to deal with the people who commit the vast majority of crime in a city. Perhaps you should look at that statistic – the one that shows that less than 10% of criminals commit over 90% of the crime. You don’t want to deal with them, so you hand it to cops. These criminals are smelly, mean, violent, angry, recidivist and without a conscience. Keep handcuffing your police. Go ahead. Beat them down. But don’t holler for them to come to your aid when it’s your turn to become the victim. They’ll be reticent to risk getting caught on the video that might take their livelihood or put their lives in danger. It’s better to wait for the bad guy to finish his work, then just come for the paper…whether it’s an assault report or a coroner’s report.